Cleaning up my Evernote and saving all my old info to my computer

[dustinandjoey 0]

I have years of old information on my Evernote. I would like to clean it up by starting from scratch, but don't want to just delete everything... I would like to save it all on my computer. Is there a way I can just download everything off of Evernote? And if I can, can I open that content without using Evernote? Or do I have to manually save every single note separately?

 

[PinkElephant 8,103]

You don’t tell anything about your current computer, and you don’t say what you mean by open content without EN. This can mean it is ok if there is one single other program able to read it, or you want universal readability (like for pdf or jpeg files).

So as a general answer, to my own best knowledge:

The best export options are still available in the legacy clients for Windows and Mac. I would install this version if I wanted to export a lot. V10 is improving on export, the last version 10.13.4 got some additional export features.

There are basically 2 export formats

• ENEX is one file for a bunch of notes, like a complete notebook. It is not advisable to export more than one notebook per ENEX file, because the information in which notebook a note is residing is not exported. So do one ENEX per notebook, and name it after the notebook. Many other programs can read and import ENEX files - it is the classical way to move from EN to another app.
• HTML exports each note into a HTML file. This can be opened with any browser. But you get a lot of files when you export a lot of notes, and the structure from EN to organize this heap of data is not available. HTML is universal, but it is better to export one or a few selected notes, not whole note structures.

There are more variations to the subject, but these 2 cover most use cases.

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, dustinandjoey said:

Is there a way I can just download everything off of Evernote? And if I can, can I open that content without using Evernote?

I use the Evernote Legacy product and my backups include a full export in html format    
Individual files are created for each note, and are readable by any browser app   
Export is an Evernote feature on the Mac/Windows platforms

[gazumped 11,664]

If you are a subscriber,  you have pretty much an unlimited amount of storage.  I forinstance after 12(ish) years have 53,000 notes - actually going back further than that because I digitised a paper filing and library area early on.  Some of my stuff is probably 30 years old.  Now I could spend an hour or two every day for the next 10 years going through my old notes to weed out the so-old-its-irrelevant-now stuff...  or I could employ those 3 solid years of effective working time just doing whatever jobs I want to do in the meanwhile,  and if I find some old stuff in the process,  I'll throw it out.  But while making everything look neat and tidy can be very satisfying,  it's generally a complete and utter waste of valuable time. 

Evernote's storage formats are designed to work best in Evernote with its inbuilt searching and categorising features.  Exporting notes will give you a huge folder full of Megabytes (in my case Gigabytes!) of random individual files that will be a pig to manage.  Good luck with that!

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, dustinandjoey said:

I have years of old information on my Evernote. I would like to clean it up by starting from scratch, but don't want to just delete everything... I would like to save it all on my computer. Is there a way I can just download everything off of Evernote? And if I can, can I open that content without using Evernote? Or do I have to manually save every single note separately?

 

You could move everything you have into one folder.  Put the folder into a stack if you want to separate it from future searches.  Then create your new stuff but still have easy access to the old stuff.

Or depending upon platform you print everything to PDF in chunks.  Print multiple notes at a time using the start a new page for each note option.  Not much effort in the first option..